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<title>The Pain-Body Cycle: I - Mother Goose by DetournementArc</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28557819">The Pain-Body Cycle: I - Mother Goose</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc'>DetournementArc</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Pain-Body Cycle [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Homophobia, Other, Transphobia, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:53:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>797</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28557819</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>a collection of short stories</p><p>TW: Graphic violence, transphobia, homophobia, body horror</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Pain-Body Cycle [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2092401</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Pain-Body Cycle: I - Mother Goose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Charlotte was aching for a story to tell her children.</p><p>Her feet chafed in ill-fitting shoes. It was simple enough to replace the ones that had wore through to the soles, but it seemed all the shoes in her size had been worn away. She kept a few prettier shoes in her apartment, but those were often the most ill-fitted of all of them. Now she walked in what should have been sturdy boots in some past life.</p><p>She picked through the rubble of what was once a local library. Her old library card belonged here. She always regretted not being able to update her name on the card before everything happened. The books here were hardly in good order. Those that hadn’t burned on the first day or waterlogged under the rains and snow were claimed as food by the insects and bedding by the rodents. She could only scavenge the loose scraps, assembling an apocrypha of loose-leaf pages glued together by her own fading memory and imagination.</p><p>The corpse at the desk turned to her, “And what have we this week, Tim?”</p><p>Charlotte ignored him, stepping over another corpse that called her ‘faggot’ over and over through caved and rotted lungs. She could ignore them all, she thought, but she couldn’t figure out why they hated her so much. It was true enough that she was the only living person she’d known since The Day. She figured it might be envy.</p><p>She couldn’t remember The Day, though the last date on all the magazines she found spoke to her being in her mid-twenties. She remembered the world before well enough, the cruelties of the living, the saving for HRT and name changes. Then, smoke, the offices she was going to in order to certify the day she could finally Become Herself vanishing in fire and rubble.</p><p>The corpses toyed with her fragile memory, claiming that she’s been at fault for All Of It. How Dare He. How Dare You, Faggot Boy. Her dad screamed at her when he found dresses and taffeta in her room. “People like you grow up to be Serial Killers,” he said. She craned her neck, looking at the thousands of corpses that seemed to overflow from the derelict buildings that loomed overhead, how their limbs tangled into chains and great scaffoldings, how some were locked in place like the bodies at Pompeii with no ash to hold them in place. If she had managed all of this, she’d be impressed.</p><p>But none of this is what bothered her. What bothered her sat in the crumpled stacks in her arms as she made the journey home. She could feel the bile in her head seeping into the pages. The bile was animating the bodies all around her, was sculpting their otherwise still bodies into the morbid piles of avant-garde viscera when she wasn’t looking, were twisting the streets so her walk home took longer every day.</p><p>The nursery was as still and empty as anywhere else. Charlotte was thankful that the last day on Earth was a Saturday. Child corpses were rare enough, which was a blessing, because age never managed to still the horrid things they’d be animated to say. The halls made her feel huge, but reminded her of when she was small, reminded her of tiny, stolen moments of furtive comfort under warm library windows and in the emerald grass of spring when the cruel boys were too busy to notice her for their quota of banal torments.</p><p>She wanted a future so bad it hurt her, but a past was still something.</p><p>She sat in the classroom she had staked out, on the ratty, soft green chair. The smell of chalk still thick in its stagnant air. All around her, circles of porcelain dolls. She went to read to them, to desperately try to push something out of her head that could make these dolls dance and hope and dream like it made dead flesh to spit and hate and mutate and laugh.</p><p>She unfurled the pages. It was already too late. The pages were blackened and curled as though they had been held just shy of a flame, the words were smears, primal howls of the pain that saturated the space between buildings and dolls and books thicker than air. She caught a glimpse of the last corpse in the mirror, an impossibly withered old man in a ratty, soft green chair, bones turned into swelling burls at the joints, loose face hung heavy with matted yellow hair.</p><p>She wept, knowing that her tears could do nothing but strangle the future, and that her eyes could do nothing but create tears and witness the horrid things they created.</p><p>She laid, and wept, a mother of corpses.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Next time: a story on unbearable weight</p></blockquote></div></div>
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